Evaluating CRISPR-based Prime Editing for cancer modeling and CFTR repair in intestinal organoids

Abstract

Prime editing is a recently reported genome editing tool employing a nickase-cas9 fused to a reverse transcriptase that directly synthesizes the desired edit at the target site. The technique holds great promise for clinical application due to its versatility. Here, we explore the use of prime editing in human intestinal organoids. Common TP53 mutations were modeled in human adult stem cell with notable efficiency differences. Next, we functionally repaired the cystic fibrosis CFTR-F508del mutation and compared prime editing to CRISPR/Cas9-mediated homology directed repair and adenine base editing on the CFTR-R785* mutation. Despite encountering varying editing efficiencies and undesired mutations, these results underline the broad applicability of prime editing for modeling oncogenic mutations and showcase the potential clinical application of this technique, pending further optimization.